trek

Here’s a fun clip I stumbled across on Youtube. Some enterprising (ha) soul has created an animation of all the battles from “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” still the best film in that mixed bag of a series. If you know and love the film, it adds greater understanding to the choreography of the ships’ interactions. Even if you have no or little familiarity with the film, it’s still fun to watch.

As an added bonus (for me, anyway), it brings back memories of the old vector-graphic-based Space Wars arcade game I so loved as a kid of the 70s (and which is still possibly my favorite arcade game, even now).

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I’ve enjoyed a long tradition and it’s time to revisit it today. The tradition goes like this: I look at the current state of Star Trek and say, “Paramount can’t possibly screw this up any worse than they have!” And Paramount responds, “Wanna BET?”

Now they’ve outdone themselves, tapping Quentin Tarantino (!) to direct the next Trek movie and erase any lingering vestiges of what the property once represented. But at least we get this awesome fan trailer, which is likely as close as I’ll get to seeing the film:

The first episode of Star Trek aired on NBC fifty years ago today, Sept. 8, 1966, kicking off a three-year run on network TV. I missed the whole thing.

In my defense, I started that run as a baby and ended it as a preschooler, but when the show aired in syndication in the early to mid-70s, I made up for lost time. I’m reasonably certain I was introduced to Trek by my grandfather, who was a big fan. My earliest impression was that it was scary, but in a cool way. Every new planet posed a new set of threats: deadly viruses, hissing lizard men, sparkly clouds that sucked out your red blood cells, the still-living spirit of Jack the Ripper…heck, even the landscapes could kill you, with acidic soil, flowers that exploded in your face and rocks that stood up and started fighting you. Just the everyday routine of “beaming down” unnerved me, as it involved disintegrating living bodies to their component atoms and reconstructing them somewhere else (Dr McCoy shared my unease, and with good reason, as the technology frequently failed, with all kinds of nasty results).

The creepy Spock character, thought young me, was kind of like Barnabas Collins but with pointy ears instead of pointy teeth. And I must not have seen Part 2 of “The Menagerie,” because I was convinced the scarred, disabled Captain Pike was forever lurking in a room somewhere deep in the bowels of the Enterprise.

Add to that an endless list of space-borne threats including enemy ships, ion storms, radiation surges, meteor strikes, giant ghostly hands, you name it, and space travel was basically one big, 24-7 danger fest. Like most kids, though, I was attracted to scary things, at least scary things that could be decisively conquered in an hour’s time, so this was right up my alley. After all, that constant undercurrent of danger was also a part of the real-life Apollo missions I watched with fascination during the same period.

The official line now is that Star Trek has endured because of its “positive view of the future” and progressive messages. I’m not sure how radical optimism was in its day, though: a “gee whiz” outlook towards invention and technology goes way back to Buck Rogers, and considering the 50 years prior to Trek had seen us progress from the Wright Flyer to lunar orbital missions, I’d imagine lots of people had an “anything’s possible” outlook towards tech. Or maybe the point is that in an era of race riots, assassinations and a nasty war in Southeast Asia, the mere declaration that we would survive into the 23rd Century constituted audacious optimism. If so, the strength of the show was that this was never dwelt on at length, just presented as fact; “Oh look, we’re still alive in the future. Cool. Now what’s the story this week?” As for Trek’s stories “meaning something” and conveying social commentary, well that’s nice when it works, but I guarantee you nobody tuned in then or now to be preached to. What made the show compelling was the drama, the humor, the excitement, the relationships between the characters, the cool (for their day) special effects, the great sets and gadgets, the generally excellent production values (especially for TV) and music. It was just a quality show, period.

Anyway it certainly loomed large in my childhood. I remember running around the back yard, battling imaginary Klingons with a plastic “phaser” that shot spinning helicopter-like wheels; it was one of those cheap toys you bought off a peg at the drug store. I even talked my grandma into buying me a toy gun that shot discs just because the packaging said, “Star Trek,” though it didn’t look like anything ever seen on the show. As soon as you pulled it off the cardboard, it ceased to have any connection to Trek whatever. Pretty sure I also had the “Parachuting Mr. Spock” figure, which made no sense at all. (Check out the Plaid Stallions site for a list of the coolest Trek toys of the 70s, too many of which I owned)

Between us, my brother and I collected every member of the Enterprise crew available as a Mego action figure (well, except for Uhura. Girl “action figures” were dolls!). There was even a bridge playset with a “transporter” that spun around and — voila! — the figure disappeared. It’s still in my garage.

I had jigsaw puzzles featuring the “animated series” versions of the characters (Spock’s skin was bright green!), and a Corgi die-cast model of the Enterprise that got just about everything wrong, from a saucer section that fired discs to a shuttle bay on the bottom (!) of the secondary hull that housed a shuttle five times too large. Probably the coolest Trek merchandise we had was a set of walkie-talkies that looked — sort of — like communicators, complete with little doors that flipped up. In the TV commercial, one of the kids using the “communicator” called his playmate and said, “Scott, this is Kevin, my bike is broken!” Every now and then I managed to talk my brother into playing Star Trek, which wasn’t easy because he could never be Captain Kirk (one of the pitfalls of being a little brother; he was always Robin to my Batman, Tonto to my Lone Ranger, etc). Invariably, after I’d gone to some lengths to set up a Trek-worthy plotline to enact in our yard, he’d summon me via communicator with a breathless, “Captain! Do you read me? Come in, Captain!” In my most earnest, ramrod-straight Shatner impression I would respond, “Kirk here, what is it?” And he would answer, “My bike is broken! HAHAHAHAHA!”

Those were the “dry” years for Trek, with the show long out of production and the later movies little more than a pipe dream. We got by on novelizations by British author James Blish, with plots and characterizations that always fell somewhere between “slightly off” and “wildly inaccurate.” The library in my small town school had a copy of volume 8 of this series and I kept it out on near-permanent loan. Then there were the Gold Key comics, featuring an Enterprise crew that might have been named the same as they were on the show, but looked, dressed, talked and acted nothing like the real deal.

At last the drought ended with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which I managed to stay awake through in December of 1979 on my first visit to a “multi-plex” theater in Richmond. My folks agreed to bring along a couple of my friends on the roughly hour and a half trip to the city, which they may have regretted when we had to take them all home again in a mini-blizzard. A couple years later came Wrath of Khan, which blew my socks off despite the guy in the back of the theater who, when the USS Defiant flew across the screen, yelled out, “De Plane! De Plane!” in his best Herve Villechaize impression (because Ricardo Montalban was also on…oh, never mind). And then the rest of the sequels were cranked out more or less bi-annually in a seeming effort to illustrate the Law of Diminishing Returns. Finally, the old cast moved aside to make way for the next generation of characters, and now Kirk and crew have been re-imagined in the form of pretty youngsters who look more suited to a remake of Saved By the Bell, with scripts to match.

It’s cool that Trek has become something of an institution I guess, but in a way, four spin-off series (with a new one on the way), 13 movies and countless books, comics and video games have built up a thick crust of barnacles on the Enterprise hull and blurred somewhat the magic of those original 79 episodes. It doesn’t help that every detail of the show has been researched, documented and analyzed ad nauseum, so now we know how those effects were achieved, who was in that rubber suit, why that cast member stopped showing up. Worse, we’ve seen the crumbling away of the carefully-constructed image of a cast who loved working together, leaving us with the reality of embittered 70- and 80-something ex-actors sniping at each other in the press like pouty teenagers.

BUT…at the end of the day, it’s those original 79 episodes that matter; everything else is apocrypha, mere distraction. When I view them on DVD (or more likely, Netflix), the years fall away and I’m back on the original Enterprise, where everyone is young and vital again, wearing colorful uniforms and pointed sideburns and tackling the threat of the week with courage and teamwork. Even at its worst (and it could get pretty bad) Star Trek was always interesting to watch, but at its best it was some of the greatest television to hit the airwaves. More, it’s something that still connects me with my grandfather, though he’s gone, and something I can pass on to my kids, to maybe enjoy when I’m gone, too. It’s the past and the future all at once.

Long ago, before the geeks inherited the Earth, before “Big Bang Theory” ruled the airwaves and superhero movies ruled at the box office, before everyone and his brother had a Dr Who t-shirt, “nerd” was not a label we wore with comfort, let alone bragged about. Being a nerd meant being ostracized, teased and bullied. Back then, your love for science fiction or comic books was something you kept to yourself, until, through some secret signal or other, you connected with a fellow traveler, thereafter to spend your lunches in the school cafeteria together, gleefully — if quietly — comparing notes on favorite Bradbury or Asimov stories, debating whether the Flash could outrun Quicksilver, or trying to figure out the science (if any) behind warp speed and photon torpedoes.

If there was an icon for us in those days, it was undeniably Mr. Spock, the ultimate outsider, the only one of his kind on a crowded ship where everyone else fit in. Like us, he was defined by his otherness. His brain worked differently from his peers, which gave him satisfaction and a sense of identity but also loneliness and pain. Where we stuck out as different with our thick glasses or braces or bad skin or never-quite stylish clothes, for him it was those pointed ears; at once cool and unsettling, weird and mesmerizing, they set him apart from everyone else, which could be a good and bad thing, often at once. And that’s why we “grokked” Spock. We may not have come from the planet Vulcan, but we knew what it was to be alien. In the end we were vindicated as Spock’s logical mind often saved the ship, or whole worlds, and intelligence was revealed not as a liability but in fact a superpower. (And just for good measure, he was the strongest guy on the ship, even if his pacifism kept all that power in check.)

Under the makeup and ears was Leonard Nimoy, an actor of considerable intellect and ability who worked hard to preserve his character’s dignity and saw it pay off as he and Spock grew into cultural icons. Fifty years later, with Star Trek such an integral part of popular culture, it’s easy to forget what a hugely courageous act it was to put on those ears for the first time. Like any actor, Mr. Nimoy must have wanted to be respected for his work, and to get more work, but both respect and future employment were on the line if the gamble failed, if no one would see beyond that odd makeup to the soul of the character. Today even Academy Award winners line up to shave their heads, paint their faces and apply fake noses, brows, ears and hair for superhero and science fiction films, but Nimoy took up the challenge in an age where most celluloid science fiction involved zippered, rubber monster suits, giant insects and wobbly flying saucers. There were no guarantees he’d come out on the other end of Star Trek with any kind of career at all. It was to his great credit that he saw the potential in the character and was willing to put so much on the line to bring it to life. Everyone making millions today off of nerd-friendly movies and TV owes him a Vulcan salute.

Of course, there was a lot more to Nimoy than Spock. He was a talented poet and photographer and directed non-Trek films like Three Men and A Baby and The Good Mother, for starters. But it’s a testament to the talent and sincerity he poured into Star Trek that, for once, it doesn’t seem disrespectful to link a real person to a fictional character. For many, thanks to Nimoy, Spock was as real as anyone they knew. Which, on the downside, kind of makes this a double loss.

The last reel of Wrath of Khan, still and probably always the best of the Trek films, is filled with three-hanky moments as Spock sacrifices himself for the ship, says goodbye to his best friend and is given a “burial in space,” but the moment that always hits me hardest is when McCoy calls up to Kirk, still on the bridge, and tells him he’d better come running. Until now, Kirk has been so wrapped up in his battle with Khan that he hasn’t even noticed Spock’s left the bridge, but as soon as he hears that cryptic plea from McCoy, he knows what’s happened. He looks over to the science station to see Spock’s empty chair and the truth hits him like a punch to the gut. That image of the empty chair is more powerful in its understatement than all the gory makeup or teary dialog that follows. Today the chair is empty again, but unlike in the movies, and with due respect to Mr. Nimoy’s nominal successor in the role, that’s the way it’s going to stay.